The Hideaway by Lauren K. Denton

When her grandmother’s will wrenches Sara back home from New Orleans, she learns more about Margaret Van Buren in the wake of her death than she ever did in life.

After her last remaining family member dies, Sara Jenkins goes home to The Hideaway, her grandmother Mags's ramshackle B&B in Sweet Bay, Alabama. She intends to quickly tie up loose ends then return to her busy life and thriving antique shop in New Orleans. Instead, she learns Mags has willed her The Hideaway and charged her with renovating it—no small task considering Mags’s best friends, a motley crew of senior citizens, still live there.

Rather than hurrying back to New Orleans, Sara stays in Sweet Bay and begins the biggest house-rehabbing project of her career. Amid Sheetrock dust, old memories, and a charming contractor, she discovers that slipping back into life at The Hideaway is easier than she expected.

Then she discovers a box Mags left in the attic with clues to a life Sara never imagined for her grandmother. With help from Mags’s friends, Sara begins to piece together the mysterious life of bravery, passion, and choices that changed Mags’s destiny in both marvelous and devastating ways.

When an opportunistic land developer threatens to seize The Hideaway, Sara is forced to make a choice—stay in Sweet Bay and fight for the house and the people she’s grown to love or leave again and return to her successful but solitary life in New Orleans. @goodreads 

If you're looking for a sweet story about friends and community, this is one of the books.

Sara lives in New Orleans and has a shop called Bits and Pieces, where she fixes up and sells stuff. She has some other things in the store as well. She thinks she has the perfect life.

Then Sara gets a call from her grandmother Mags lawyer. Mag's had passed away that morning. Sara feels really bad because she never returned her grandmother's call and now she's gone.

Then Sara gets another hit when she finds out Mags left The Hideaway (her run down B&B) to her. It hasn't really been a B&B in years, just a place where Mags lived with some friends she met many years ago and let the place be their home too.

Sara is supposed to fix the place up and then decide what she wants to do with it. Sara is under a lot of distress because she wants to go back to New Orleans and run her own business. But, as her awesome employee, Allyn, tells her she can drive up from Alabama in three hours to check on the store while he runs it.

I'm not going to say what she ultimately does but it works out for everyone involved.

The book goes back and forth from the present with Sara and the past with Mags. There is a mystery/love story in Mags past and it effects Sara as well.

I think most people that like nice little contemporary novels will love this book.

*I received a print book through BookLookBloggers*

GOODREADS REVIEW:

 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1994539674